Page 4 of Tidal Creatures

Máni glares at her before he finally, belatedly, steps through the gate. The tunnel into everything on the other side trembles, shaking like a clothesline in a heavy wind, and then the gate is gone, and the place where it was is only the blank granite wall of the Campanile, the great bell tower that virtually dominates the campus. It was severely damaged in the earthquake almost ten years ago; the granite facing was only restored to the sides earlier this year, completing its long and intricate repair. The gate anchors here roughly once a month, which is convenient, if a bit more exposed than Chang’e prefers.

The gleaming silver blood on Máni’s clothes and hands remains, a scrap of the incarnate world carried over into this one, and the sight of it is unnerving and exciting. This is something new.

The gate is gone, but the process isn’t finished. Chang’e holds out her hand. “Key, please.”

Máni looks at her with disgust but reaches into his pocket and produces the key, which is the same silver as Aske’s blood. His fingers leave red smears on the metal, completing the likeness. Chang’e takes it and slides it into her pocket, bowing her head in acknowledgment. He doesn’t return the gesture.

There is a shining light in the air around them, glitter dancing in the watery beams of the rising sun. As the key finds its place at the bottom of her pocket, the glitter fades, and the light fades with it, and they finally step down from their divinity, two shining figures becoming two twentysomething college students. Anyone who sees it happen will dismiss it as a trick of the morning air, a mirage, and it’s both those things, but it’s also a reality, as so many mirages are.

“The fuck, David?” asks Judy.

He raises his hands, showing her the blood on his fingers. It’s visible against his dark skin in the dim light because there’s still silver threaded through it, bright and impossible. “I can’t believe you made me leave her there,” he complains.

“Okay, as we’ve tried to make you understand, I didn’t do that,” says Judy. “Chang’e did that. We’re not the same as our deities, we’re more … the reflections they cast when they aren’t using the energy to manifest.”

He rolls his eyes. “I was here first.”

“Debatable. But: if you saw a corpse, would you be able to bring yourself to pick it up and carry it back to your dorm? And even if you could, would you be able to go and do a full shift at your job first, knowing the body was there?”

David blanches. He’s a dark enough man under normal circumstances that it doesn’t show as much as it might, but he normally looks a lot healthier than that. How he avoids getting a tan when he spends half his time on the football field, Judy may never know.

“I don’t know how I was able to just walk away from her like that.” He looks over his shoulder at the wall, which shows no traces of the gate. “I just left her there.”

“No, Máni did,” says Judy. “You need to get a little distance between you. You’ll be able to do this a lot longer if you can. We can’t go around being gods all the time. Thank you for bringing back the key; I’ll go talk to Diana this afternoon. Do you want to be there?”

“I have practice,” he says, quickly. He’s afraid of Diana. Most of the new incarnates are. She’s the only one a lot of them have heard of before they encounter the whole pantheon, and while she’s not the most powerful of them, her name gives her a certain reputation that Judy can’t decide whether she wants to envy or be grateful she doesn’t have to deal with.

“Okay,” she says, shrugging. Then she looks at his hands again. “When you wash up, be sure to use bleach.”

“I didn’t kill her,” he said.

“I know. This isn’t about destroying the evidence. It’s about making sure the alchemists can’t use it.”

“Oh. Right.”

There aren’t many alchemists on campus these days. New gods still need to learn good habits, like not washing traces of divinity down communal sinks. She sighs as she turns away.

Time to head for her advisor’s office and begin dealing with the mortal, mundane day. God business can wait.

After all, what’s the point of being a living face of the Moon if she still has to hurry?

Mare Cognitum

TIMELINE: AUGUST 17, 2017. FOUR DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

The alarm is going off again.

Kelpie doesn’t look up from the reagent she’s trying to mix. Several of the compounds she’s using are dangerous ones, and on some level, she’s incredibly proud that Margaret is willing to trust her with volatile chemicals, given the proof of past lab accidents that she sees every time she looks in a mirror. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for management to restrict her to harmless tasks, like feeding the frogs in the bio lab or gathering the laundry. The alarm is a distraction, but it’s not going to break her focus, oh, no. It’s not going to make her mess up again.

Maybe if she’d been this focused before the accident, she wouldn’t be in her current condition. But as Margaret likes to say, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, and the only person who can bottle the past is a reality traitor who refuses to support the people who created her.

Kelpie doesn’t understand that. Life is a gift. Constructs receive it as a burden, a task to complete to the best of their abilities, and cuckoos receive it as a treasure, a great and glorious miracle to be reveled in and revealed. For a cuckoo to reject the gift of their creation and go rogue is unthinkable. Yet two of them have, Reed’s “perfect creations” choosing not only to flee the nest but to leave it burning behind them. It doesn’t make sense. They should have been the most loyal of their kind, and instead they killed the man who made them and fled into the wider world, where they had yet to be recovered.

She wishes the damn alarm would stop. It’s starting to make her head ache, and when she gets a bad enough headache, she sometimes has to lie down for days. Margaret says it’s leftover trauma from the accident, buried memories of the explosion purging themselves from her psyche. Kelpie wants to believe her. She wants to believe this is something that might eventually get better. And to be fair, a lot of things have improved over the last year. She had to relearn how to walk, how to dress herself, all sorts of everyday tasks she’s sure were easy once, before she forgot everything she knew and was forcibly demoted back to lab assistant for her own safety.

The alarm finally stops. She relaxes, reaching for the next flask on her list. Alarms are virtually an hourly occurrence when the lab is active, and this is a big season for them; there’s a total solar eclipse approaching, and many of their projects will be able to mature or even come to full fruition while the sun is blocked by the moon. It’s all about the sympathies, the greater universe singing to their work until a harmony can be established.

She doesn’t remember the specifics anymore. She supposes that’s one of the things Margaret has yet to teach her, but she’s eager to relearn. The more she can recover of who she used to be, the better she’ll be able to cope with who she currently is, and the easier it will be to see a path back to her true nature. Understanding is the key to evolution, after all.